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Introduction 1. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 75. 2. All of the ellipses here and below are Badu’s own. Millions More Movement, Afternoon (Washington, D.C.: C-SPAN Video Library, 2006). 3. On disidentification as an engagement with a dominant ideology that “neither opts to assimilate within such a structure nor strictly opposes it” but rather “works on and against dominant ideology,” see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 4. Taylor, Archive, 75. On how Badu “presents a spectrum of black womanhood” that contests black popular culture’s—and black political culture’s—masculinism, see Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post– Civil Rights Era (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 192. On how the black love song often uses the black signifying practice of indirection to critique state repression, see Michael George Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 51. 5. Erykah Badu, New Amerykah, Pt. I: 4th World War (2008). 6. Maurice O. Wallace has pointed out that the Million Man March “perceives the crisis of black America phallocentrically as the consequence of an embattledblack masculinity .” See also Wahneema Lubiano’s critical assessment of black nationalist “commonsense ” that places the Million Man Marchwithin a frame of romantic, conservative black family values. Wallace, Constructing the Black Masculine: Identity and Ideality in African American Men’s Literature and Culture, 1775–1995 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 5; Lubiano, “Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others,” in The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, AngelaY. Davis, CornelWest, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 251. For me, the anniversary march was a staging of the charismatic scenario that pointed to the transparent masculinism of the African American charismatic ideal:leadershipwas depicted as the rightful domain of men, and political empowerment was understood in the context of Notes 199 black men’s “aton[ing] to God for [their] shortcomings as men,husbands and fathers” “Millions More Movement: 10th Anniversary Commemoration of the Million Man March,” http://www.millionsmoremovement.com. See also Amy Alexander, The Farrakhan Factor: African AmericanWriters on Leadership, Nationhood, and Minister Louis Farrakhan (NewYork: Grove Press, 1997); and Kenneth W. Warren, So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 7. Dora Muhammad, “Erykah Badu Opens Up about Her Religion, Current Tour, True Freedom, and the Millions More Movement,” Final Call, 2005, http://www.final call.com/. 8. Black feminist activism and scholarship have been shaped by their attention to how intraracialhierarchies of gender and class affecthowblackwomen are positioned within black social and political movements as well as in American political, academic , and popular cultures at large. When Frances Beale addressed the issue of Black Power leadership, for example, she lamented that because “the Black male has exerted a more prominent leadership role in our struggle for justice in this country” and black men are “maintaining that they have been castrated by a society but that Black women somehow escaped this persecution and even contributed to this emasculation ,” the black woman “can justly be described as a ‘slave of a slave.’” Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara (NewYork: Washington Square Press, 2005), 112. See also bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); and Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981). My aim is to advance black feminist critiques of intraracial disciplining within black political culture by raising the question of how charisma has functioned throughout the contemporary era as a cultural, affective, performative, and historiographical complex of black leadership that naturalizes and normalizes unequal relations of power. 9. Daphne Brooks, “‘AllThatYou Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2007): 184. 10. Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 58, emphasis added. 11. Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: BlackWomen Performers and the...